Price?

Any idea of what the retail price is likely to be? I'd certainly consider it, even if it is an order of magnitude more expensive than the HDD version, simply because of reliability. I've lost two laptop HDDs in the past year with painful consequences (I do back up, but with a daily stream of photography going from my cameras to my laptop, I really can't back up frequently enough).

0.5G?

"It can stand up to 20G of vibration - the HDD can withstand only 0.5G, Samsung said."

The old HDD could only handle 0.5G? So does that mean you could only use it on the moon... or maybe the ISS? Seems odd that Samsung would build a HDD that couldn't even handle earth's 1.0G of gravity. :) :)

@.5G?

Um, you're misunderstanding the "G" here. Earth's gravity is a constant force. When you're accelerating or decelerating something in any direction, G-forces come into play. Like when you're pushed back in your car seat during acceleration, or the sudden surge of G force (deceleration) that splatters your guts all over the pavement if you jump off a building. So the drive can only handle the equivalent acceleration of ½ of an Earth gravity in any direction, vibration being repetitive acceleration/deceleration.

@dave

Reliability?

What's the reliability over millions of read/write cycles on these devices? Also, there's no viable last-chance-saloon disaster data recovery as there is with mechanical HDDs. Forensic recovery of a disk platter is costly but only comparable to a few days of lost work. If a junction in a SSD goes presumably you're

Why we might not see a rapid price drop

Problem with SSDs dropping in price is it devalues existing hard drives and more importantly will breath a new lease of life into existing old laptops that will receive a massive performance boost and decrease in heat (and thus keep the cooling fans from kicking in). How many laptop manufacturers are going to be happy with consumers just buying a cheap SSD rather than their spanking new latest model laptop?

Incomplete comparison

dB

Re: Selling spanking new latest model laptops

No matter what hard drive is used, laptops will continue to grow old and cranky then keel over when you look at them funny, necessitating the purchase of either a used laptop of the same model (with just as much remaining robustness within earshot of an indigestive parakeet) or a spanking new latest model laptop.

I assume this lifespan issue is due to the abuse laptops must take by being handled all the time, while also being less protected than desktops by having to fit into a tighter volume with lighter materials. (No doubt, there are materials that can be both light and strong, but then they aren't as cheap.)

Laptops break?

I know that a lot of laptop hdds go out because they don't get properly cooled. The SSDs consume less power, thus create less heat.

That vibration for the hard drive must be while operating, as most of them can do something like 300G with the heads unloaded. I doubt that the SSD becomes more durable while it is unused, so maybe it'd be more likely to break more when dropped (any decent modern laptop has accelerometers to park heads when 9.8m/s^2 acceleration is detected.)

And if you want a laptop that will last, jsut buy a nice one. My Fujitsu ultra portable has been going strong for 3.5 years, and it was in my lightly padded back pack during a few bike and skateboard accidents, plus I've stepped on it a few times and put thousands of miles of airline and train travel on it.

And everyone that I know that owns a Dell laptop hasn't had it last more than 18 months without a backlight, battery, power supply, motherboard, keyboard, or touchpad going dead.

@ Nexox Enigma

"And everyone that I know that owns a Dell laptop hasn't had it last more than 18 months without a backlight, battery, power supply, motherboard, keyboard, or touchpad going dead."

Tell your mates to stop buying the Inspiron "consumer grade" crap, then. At $DAY_JOB we get the Lattitude models, and out of roughly 30 of them in the field for the past 3 years, fewer than 10% have had even one of the problems you name. One of them had every single piece of plastic on the case broken, and the metal shell behind the screen badly dented, but continued to work until my luser managed to crash the hard drive. He'd probably still be using the original drive had it been an SSD.

Mind you, there's nothing wrong with the Toshibas, nor the Panasonic Toughbooks (nor the Acers, for that matter). I just don't think it's right to judge all Dells based on a sample of their cheapest, meant-to-be-disposable craptops.

Write performance?

While I have no reason to doubt figures provided, solid state memory up to date suffers from poor write throughput. And there is no say in the article whether this disk is any better. As to write cycles, I do not think there is serious problem - sufficiently smart algorithms can distribute writes evenly over all memory cells, and this together with some extra storage should make good enough reliability and longevity. Cmon, you will replace your HDD after 5 years anyway.

D620

My D620 has been going strong for over a year now. Nothing fancy, but it has never let me down yet. I'm really hoping this technology comes along quickly though. I need to give my Compaq R4000-series a kick in the pants, and after having added a ton of RAM, the 4000 RPM 2mb cache drive is the next weakest link in the chain.